Second of three posts

I'm writing all three of these at a more-or-less glacial pace, but that also means I get to think about what I'm writing before I write it. Doesn't really matter since (almost) no one will ever read this. This post is about Magic: The Gathering.

I recently started playing Magic again after about a 30-year hiatus. I started playing in 7th grade, 1994, and stopped playing in 8th grade. As I got more into Euro games in college I adopted the standard position that Magic is a badly-designed scam for corporations to take advantage of losers who aren't real gamers like we are. That Magic players are a lower form of life than Euro gamers.

I no longer think this.

The turning point here was that Bruce told me about "Commander," a Magic format: each deck is 100 unique cards, has one "commander" card that starts out available to play (so you don't have to worry about whether your one good card will be buried in your deck), and most importantly, can be purchased in pre-made forms reasonably cheaply and those pre-constructed decks are actually competitive and well-designed. I thought, well, the cost of trying this out is low, and I have a good community at the game store we already play at, so let's try this out. And I had a blast! The game has been streamlined a lot since 1994, the cards are both more powerful and more fun to play. It feels like, well, a game that's been polished for 30 years.

The analogy I keep coming back to is that Magic started out as one game that wasn't very good, and now has become every game. Imagine you and your friends want to play a game but you can't decide what. You want to play a Garphill game, so you set up your player area for Scholars of the South Tigris. Your friend wants to play Feld, so he sets up his side of the table to play Castles of Burgundy. Someone else wants to do Gloomhaven, so they set up Gloomhaven. And then the three of you all play your preferred games, together, and it works. That's Magic, in 2024. Such a variety of different mechanics and deck styles and they all work together with a minimum of rules fussiness. Kind of incredible, as a game designer.

Tonight I did my first prerelease event, which is a format I actually like even more than Commander: you get six packs, open them, and then build a deck out of them and play. Commander is "get handed a complex machine and operate it as well as you can;" this sealed format is "cobble together an expedient fix out of these broken spare parts." The zen of Commander is that everyone's got everything they need and are operating at peak efficiency whereas sealed is that you're totally screwed but everyone else is equally totally screwed, so it's still fair. I think I like this better because it seems easier to hold the whole game in my head.

Anyway, this all represents a pretty big departure for me: I usually don't like collectible things, or direct-competitive games, or deckbuilding, and Magic is all three at once. But giving it a chance, either it's changed or I have, and I'm having a ton of fun with all this.